The title of the 2008 conference of the Organisation of News Ombudsmen was The News Ombudsman Today and Tomorrow, so it seemed ironic to be told by Joakim Jardenberg, chief executive of Mindpark, a web development agency serving five media owners, that preparations for tomorrow should include ceasing to be ombudsmen and becoming "community managers" instead.

The setting of last week's conference was Stockholm, a place so handsome that some of us are finding it hard to shake off city-envy. It was doubly ironic that we were being urged to drop the ombudsman tag by a Swede, because it's a Swedish invention. The office of ombudsman was created by royal decree in 1713, when King Karl XII decided to appoint a representative to keep public officials and the judiciary in order.

Numbers at the conference were down this year, reflecting economic pressures on news organisations, particularly in the US. Of the 40 or so people who attended, only 23 of us were working ombudsmen. Delegates included Estonia's first ombudsman and two new members from Brazil - one of them appointed by UOL, the biggest internet service provider in Latin America.

The combination of reduced numbers, uncertainty about the role in the digital age and the fact that mandates for ombudsmen differ from one news organisation to the next meant that existential concerns featured prominently in sessions and in the informal discussions over coffee and cinnamon buns.

Everyone agrees that visibility and independence are critical to the role, but some ombudsmen are more visible than others. Consuelo Cepeda Cediel, ombudsman for RCN in Colombia, and Janne Andersson, of TV4 in Sweden, have their own weekly TV shows. But the listeners and viewers editor at the Danish Broadcasting Corporation, Jacob Mollerup, and Julie Miville-Dechêne, the ombudsman for the television and radio broadcaster Société Radio-Canada, do not have access to the airwaves. They publish their reviews of complaints about television and radio on the web.

Speakers at the conference included academics and others interested in media self-regulation. The journalist Esben Orberg published a report earlier this year based on interviews with editors, academics and ombudsmen in the UK and Denmark. He told the conference about their perceptions of the upsides and disadvantages of having an ombudsman.

The advantages identified included improvements in editorial quality and increased trust in the way news is produced. Among the downsides were confusion about the organisation's editorial line and concerns about loss of editorial control. Most editors believe there are already enough controls. Orberg told delegates that "the fact that there are less than 100 ombudsmen in the world suggests that it's not necessarily an advantage to the media organisation" .

Damian Tambini, senior lecturer at the London School of Economics, told the conference that he has been looking at how ombudsmen "fit into a broader ecology of regulation and self-regulation". Although traditionally ombudsmen have been seen as more friendly to free expression than state regulation, in some ways self-regulatory institutions might be seen as chilling speech, he said, especially when they are involved in the removal of content from websites.

News organisations that don't want to open themselves up to scrutiny may find it convenient to focus on the downsides of having an ombudsman, but there are good reasons for considering this form of self-regulation in the digital age, according to the American academic Jane B Singer, who has been studying journalistic ethics on the web. "Demonstrable trustworthiness is crucial," she told delegates. "Ombudsmen are the face of that."

She and a colleague from the University of Central Lancashire have conducted a case study examining how Guardian journalists assess and incorporate user-generated content from an ethical perspective. "Journalistic ethics are not necessarily different in a network," she said. "But more emphasis on openness and transparency is needed."